The Spanish Civil War Read Online Free PDF Page A

themselves in pointless destruction. While the leaders hesitated, radical women, clerks, criminals, boys and prostitutes terrified nuns out of nunneries, burned their possessions, killed their domestic animals and chickens, and disinterred bodies. A handsome coalman danced with one disinterred corpse outside the house of the rich Marqués de Comillas, ‘delighted to be of use as a revolutionary’. Eventually, the army resumed control; some 120 people had been killed, 1 three clergy among them; the rioters had wanted to destroy ‘property and illusions’, not life. About fifty churches or other religious buildings were burned.
    This disaster was a shock which seemed to show how violent a nation lay underneath the surface of constitutional rule. The authorities were less disturbed by the revolutionary expectations of the radicals or the anarchists than by the apparently meaningless destruction caused by the populace once their blood was up. The Tragic Week was a setback to the idea that a parliamentary democracy might gradually be established: if the masses were as they showed themselves in 1909, the political class of the day thought, real democracy would result in ruin. Henceforward, politicians avoided general elections if they could and tried to arrange coalitions out of groups of parliamentarians already in the legislature. The international demonstrations of outrage against the execution of the anarchist schoolmaster, Ferrer, accused of being the prime organizer of the riots, 2 also had a contra-productive effect: the upper classes saw in these protests the hypocritical, as well as hysterical and ill-informed, reactions of a mysterious coalition of international busybodies and freemasons soon to become sadly famous as ‘anti-Spain’.
    The Prime Minister, Maura, who as a result of international complaints was dismissed by the King and abandoned by conservatives, believed that this ‘surrender in the Cortes’ after the ‘victory in the streets’ doomed the régime, since it had been seen to have given way todisorder, propaganda and malice. Thereafter the conservative party, which had held together since the 1870s, followed the liberals into disintegration. Maura moved into the wings of politics as the focus of a movement of young men angry with parliamentarianism, anxious for regeneration, but unable to gain a majority for a government. In
Maurismo
there were to be seen the springs of fascism—evident in other countries before 1914 as well (with Déroulède and Maurras in France, D’Annunzio in Italy, and even the Ulster volunteers). Maura promised a ‘revolution from above’. The malicious said that he merely desired a ‘revolution without a revolution’.
    The Moroccan war continued. Tangier, north Morocco’s best port, was excluded from the Spanish protectorate in 1912, as an international city, and the tribes refused to accept the Spanish ‘civilizing’ presence. Men, money, food and emotion continued to be poured into the country by a Spain that could only afford the first. The tribes had never been subject to the sultan; only Spain gave them a unity. In seeking an empire, Madrid thus helped to inspire nationalism.
    The three main problems in modern Spain (working-class unrest, the regional question, and the colonial wars) ruined the restoration settlement. Perhaps anyway that political edifice was too fragile to be able to outlive for long the gifted conservative historian, Cánovas, its main architect, and Sagasta, the ‘old shepherd’, his liberal opponent. Personalities count in modern politics as much as they did in the epoch of kings. Cánovas was assassinated, Sagasta died. Maura failed as a potential successor to Cánovas as much through the strength of his personality as through the weakness of his programme. Sagasta’s ultimate successor, José Canalejas, was, it was true, a journalist, orator and reformer of the first order. His government between 1910 and 1912 seemed a time of battle